it always blows my mind that so few people really know how to use it at a decent level I'll second this -- it's by far the most used swiss-army knife in my ars

it always blows my mind that so few people really know how to use it at a decent level I'll second this -- it's by far the most used swiss-army knife in my arsenal[0]. A little part of me dies when I see scripts doing grep|awk, using awk simply to print a column. After taking some time to actually read the gawk user manual a few years ago, I've found that I can do most things in awk that I was previously using grep/sed (and to a lesser extent) perl/python for in the shell. In my environment, it also comes with the benefit that I know the awk code I'm writing is supported by the version of gawk that's installed on every server/computer I come into contact with -- no having to ensure the right python/perl is available. One thing I wish there was better documentation on, though, is creating complete gawk scripts. With @include directives coupled with AWK_PATH, it's really convenient to build up a handful of utility functions that do frequent things and I've found, on several occasions, that I end up writing an .awk script instead of a bash/zsh script and it ends up being a much more straight-forward set of code. [0] Well, specifically, the 'gawk' variant